Just Feel
by Bibliotecaria.D
Summary: "The interrogator found no answers, and the mercenary made no profit."


"_The interrogator found no answers, and the mercenary made no profit."_

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**Title:** Just Feel

**Warning:** Touching. Because, y'know, that might scandalize _somebody_.

**Rating:** G

**Continuity:** G1

**Characters:** Swindle, Vortex

**Disclaimer:** The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.

**Motivation (Prompt):** _ Write! Without plotting, without thinking about what to write. Post the quintessence of your spontaneity._

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Sometimes it happened. Never predictably, never proceeded by an event or followed by words, and the time varied. Perhaps if there some way to see it coming, it would cease to trigger him this way. Trigger him it did, however, because he'd never reacted to Swindle this way before.

Before, as in 'before the Detention Centre.' Before his whole life had changed in ways that didn't mean much in the wider, unchanging context of a war, but he was still understanding how it had changed him, personally. Maybe the pieces were clicking into place for Swindle as well. Maybe neither of them really knew.

At the end of a shift, he'd be walking, and there would be Swindle, waiting at the end of a corridor. Their optics would meet, and the smarmy smile would twitch. In the early morning hours, he'd pass by in the control room and their optics lingered a moment too long. Nothing definite, but Vortex would know. No words were exchanged, no coordinates or time stamps pinged, although his communication array always primed as if anticipating - what? There was nothing he could point a finger at and say, _"That. That is how I know."_ He couldn't predict it, couldn't even understand it, but it kept happening. Late in the day when the shadows thickened, his flight would be interrupted by the jeep driving down below. Patrol would be forgotten. In the middle of the Terran night while dutifully logging his reports or walking the halls of the base, Swindle would pause nearby, and duty became unimportant.

Leisure time became consumed by another form of obligation, imposed on him without his consent. Yet it was perversely welcomed, all the same. It wasn't like the loyalty programming to Megatron rewriting bits of his code. This was voluntarily involuntary, mandatory volunteer work, a strange catch-22 of gestalt and individual and distorted interest in an unsolved mystery. From across the crowded bridge of the _Victory_, he'd see Swindle's optics dim, vivid purple down to dusky grape, and Vortex would _know_.

Maybe it was a result of the gestalt link, this knowledge, but it flew in the face of every behaviorism he'd observed in the Combaticons as a whole. None of the others faltered the way he did, rotors hitching half a beat in flight as he recognized it. Vortex looked down on Swindle as he flew overhead or they'd trade glances in the middle of the corridor, and the chopper didn't know what he saw. The shade of violet he'd known as a sign one time meant nothing the next. The spin of one tire meant _everything,_ then nothing. He couldn't pinpoint the mannerism that let him know that later - sometime soon, somewhere more private - Swindle would find him.

He'd find him, standing out in the open and optics still lingering in that strange way as Vortex landed, and the jeep would guide him down into the sand. The other Combaticon pressed him down into this planet's gritty surface with no guile, only the pressure of his hands, and Vortex laid back as if the conman's honey-smooth patter were said aloud. Swindle had a hundred hidey-holes where satellites didn't watch, and by now Vortex knew them all from ground-level.

Other times, Swindle would be waiting around the corner, arms casually crossed and intent gaze anything but. Vortex would obediently follow him down, leashed by the pressure of what he couldn't define. The lower levels of the base were no more private than the upper, the cameras just as functional as the rest, but there were areas where the otherwise smooth walls gapped. Whole section panels leaned across the halls from where nonfunctional components had been stripped out. The Constructicons had, by necessity, taken out anything they could reuse from the parts broken irreparably by the ship's crash. It left small hollows, places in concealing shadows the Combaticons' wily conmech had taken advantage of in the past. He'd found ways to change the corridors: a miniscule bump to a camera here, a light taken out there, a panel moved to block the corridor a bit more or less. He never changed anything fast enough to catch the attention of whomever watched the cameras this shift, not enough for the next shift to notice. It took time, but Swindle created privacy where there had been none before. Office space built over the course of months for black-market work, anonymity acquired for clients and conmech alike.

Greed and cunning were the mothers of invention in Swindle's clever mind, and his clients knew to follow whatever map he provided when they requested a meeting. He would guide them in and out in anonymous safety. Not that they trusted him, but the power of money? Yes. They knew it had a hold far stronger over him than mere personal bonds. Business mattered. People did not. In Swindle's self-contained universe, finances made the world go round.

It was a common belief, even a true one, but when those times came, those unpredictable times…

Sometimes, Swindle's arm brushed against him or his rotors rattled off the jeep, and their optics caught. Then, Vortex doubted it was personal at all. He knew how to read mechs, experience and training in interrogation technique giving him an uncanny eye for truth and lies, and he saw nothing in Swindle's face. Impersonal, professional interest stared back at him, cataloging him for use and discarding him in a split second before moving on, and the jeep returned to what he'd been doing. The gestalt linked them, but Swindle had proven how little that meant. He had, after all, sold his own gestalt off to the humans for petty cash.

Vortex turned away, deciding over and over again that it was nothing more than convenience that motivated those infrequent times. Natural curiosity subsided into wavelets of doubt; the interrogator deliberately forgot the times it wasn't convenient. He refused to think about the punishing miles Swindle trekked to a rock overhang in the Gobi Desert where the satellites couldn't watch, or the business deals interrupted by a glance that lasted too long. The smile that never even flinched before Megatron's fusion cannon became tinfoil-flimsy in the space of a shared look stretching out between them.

If Vortex questioned himself the same way he would a prisoner, the answer he forced out would admit that he just didn't know why. He didn't know why he let the smaller 'bot push him into a gap in the base walls or down in to the desert sand. No Combaticon trusted another with a flash of the throat. A vulnerable moment was a weakness to exploit, and Vortex couldn't explain his passive submission when Swindle rolled him onto his belly in the sand. He didn't fight free when the jeep pressed him back into the exposed ship circuitry. His rotors caught in loose wires, and Vortex gasped air into his intakes - but the protest never emerged. His arms sank into grains of sand too loose to allow an emergency launch into the air - but he didn't fight free. Swindle had him down, had him pinned, and the only instinct a Decepticon had was to take advantage of the situation.

But he didn't. Swindle didn't, for once in his mercenary existence, exploit the situation. It repeated every time, ripe for the taking, and despite Vortex's tense balance between trepidation and anticipation, Swindle never grabbed the offered weakness while it was on the table. In turn, Vortex could - _should_ - catch Swindle's wrists with harsh hands and begin an interrogation that would leave the jeep eager to tell him anything and everything, because the other Combaticons wouldn't sense shrieking pain over the gestalt link in time to save him. He knew it, the jeep knew it, and yet he didn't do it.

Neither acted on their first impulse, nor the second. Wariness failed to manifest. Schemes unspooled and abandoned profit at the margins of these moments, questions unasked and unanswered in the heavy silence, and two Combaticons with nothing between them met. Expecting no money, gaining no information, they met in unpredictable moments that found them instead of the other way around, and Vortex didn't understand. He suspected that Swindle didn't, either.

The jeep took him down, down to patiently-built privacy or down into the irritating rasp of dirt, and Vortex _let_ him. Hands he should shove away traced his armor, greedy for touch. Collecting the feel of him like credits, but Swindle's intensity never wavered. A single finger obsessively followed the edge of a rotor over and over again, or an entire hand spread covetously over his visor as if to absorb the smooth glass through the palm. Their chests pressed together, thigh to thigh and helm to helm, like Swindle wanted to fuse their armor, like only melting the metal and mixing it into one would bring them close enough. When only bubbles and swirls of color in the molten mix separated them, closer even than the clicking join of circuitry in a gestalt combination, would the sensation finally be enough.

The jeep always came back, grasping insatiably for more. A single hesitation at the beginning of a shift, attention mutually caught at some unseen signal between them, and smaller Combaticon spent three hours on his knees in the desert sand, upper torso pressed against Vortex's back. The side of a hand scraped down the chopper's engine mount until the paint grooved and left bare metal behind, and Swindle didn't stop. The scrapes had to be touched, the rough contrast between the edge of the paint and the beginning of bare metal thoroughly caressed until it was memorized. Even then he picked at the paint until flecks came loose. He couldn't seem to stop finding new sensations, or cease returning to the old, like a miser recounting his hoard.

Vortex lay quiet or stood pressed against the wall as if welded there, watching with the fascinated immobility of an observer, the paralyzed stillness of a bystander witnessing an inevitable crash. He stayed motionless without flinching as exposed gaps in his armor were explored and tiny pains flared from pulled wires. He couldn't predict it and couldn't explain any of it, much less why.

He felt it all, and inside, he closely questioned each and every touch.


End file.
